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PORTRAITS IN ABSENTIA: REPETITION

COMPULSION AND THE POSTMODERN


UNCANNY IN PAUL AUSTERS LEVIATHAN
SCOTT A. DIMOVITZ
The essential thing was to accept the uncanniness of the
eventnot to deny it, but to embrace it, to breathe it into
himself as a sustaining force. (Leviathan 187)

Paul Austers work seems at first read to function as a kind of casebook of
popular postmodernism, overturning old humanist certainties and celebrating
the fragmentation of knowledge and identity in the contemporary world.
Indeed, many critics view his first significant works, collected as The New
York Trilogy (1987), as perfect illustrations of any number of Jacques Derridas
theories, from dissemination to writing sous rature.1 By 1992s Leviathan,
however, Austers novels turned away from the more radical worldview
outlined in his earlier works. An extensive exploration of the manifold
dimensions of the self, Leviathan rejects postmodern notions of identity
as subjectivity, suggesting that identity should be defined not merely as an
intersection of institutions, society, or language but rather as the meeting place
of subject and objectsthe old humanist division between the individual and
the world. Identity arises from the tensions between the perceiving subjecta
body, an eye, a consciousnessand the world out there. We might describe
Austers project as the aesthetics of the stable exceptionattempts to depict
a moment of definition, the Archimedean point from which we construct the
world. Austers project becomes one that attempts to not only document the
shifting contingencies of reality, but also to map those aspects of existence
common to all peoplethe sine qua non of human identity. In this essay, I will
argue that Austers Leviathan uses Freuds concepts of repetition compulsion

Studies in the Novel, Volume 40, number 4 (Winter 2008). Copyright 2008 by the
University of North Texas. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

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and the uncanny to critique both the idea that identity can be wholly unified
and, at the opposite extreme, the idea that identity is completely decentered.
As I will contend, the real problem Austers work confronts lies in creating
a mimetic reflection of a metaphysics that attempts to revivify Providence
without God, synchronicity without significance, and chance without chaos, all
while not alienating the critically sophisticated readers who largely compose
his audience.

Having no clear and stable referent in the novel, Leviathans title invites
speculation as to its relevance to the novels themes. Mark Osteen has explored
one aspect in his fine discussion of the paradigm of political and social
interconnectedness in Hobbess Leviathan (87-91), but the more conspicuous
referent seems so far unexplored. The Hebrew leviath, as Osteen points out,
means what is joined or tied together, and while this function certainly may
allude to the novels theme of the interrelatedness of human relations, the
Biblical meaning may suggest a far darker denotation.

The Biblical leviathan actually traces back to an earlier tradition. In
the fifteenth- to thirteenth-century BCE Canaanite Ugaritic texts that were
discovered in 1928, the god Baal defeats Lothan (ltn, a variant of Leviathan),
a primordial monster with seven heads. This motif of powerful god slays a
primeval beast transferred into the later Old Testament revision.2 Leviathan,
in fact, bookends the Bible, occurring early in Yahwehs declaring his
omnipotence to JobCanst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his
tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? (Job 41.1)and in Revelations
as the seven-headed beast that returns and is subsequently defeat at the end
of time: And the beast was taken, and with him the false prophet.These
both were cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone (Revelations
19.20). As a metaphor, therefore, the leviathan suggests a cycle of arrival and
destruction that establishes a theme of repetition and the apparent impotence
of the Creator, who does not destroy the beast completely. By incorporating
these Biblical motifs, the novel uses the leviathan story to establish the theme
of characters dominated by patterns of repetition, playing and replaying the
traumas that structure their lives until their apocalyptic cessation.

Auster couples this thematic Biblical repetition with Freuds notion of
psychological repetition. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud offered his
fullest explication of the rather odd, yet apparently ubiquitous, phenomenon
of repetition compulsion, a psychiatric disorder marked by symptoms such
as recurrent ideas, ritualistic behavior, and impulses to perform acts that the
individual finds strange or abhorrent. The disorders etiology, according to
Freud, originates as a metaphoric or metonymic substitution of a disturbing
thought with another thought, action, or impulse. The new act or thought
redirects psychic tension and allows the individual a temporary reprieve
from the underlying anxiety. Freuds classic case study exploring repetition
compulsion investigated the Rat Man, a young man who replaced his own

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murderous fantasies with suicidal ideation and fantasies of rats burrowing into
anuses. These recurring fantasies seemed radically other, as if arising from
outside the self, as the individual turned the impulse to destroy inward.

Freud later applies this psychic homeostatic theory to explain the
experience of the uncanny, a feeling of awe before that which reminds us of
something long forgotten:
[A]n involuntary return to the same situationalso results in the same
feeling of helplessness and of something uncanny.[I]t is only this factor
of involuntary repetition which surrounds with an uncanny atmosphere
what would otherwise be innocent enough, and forces upon us the idea of
something fateful and inescapable where otherwise we should have spoken
of chance only. (The Uncanny 144)

Auster discusses Freuds essay The Uncanny at length in The Invention of


Solitude (1988), and I will argue later that the essay heavily influenced Austers
notion of chance, which he had been investigating for some time. For now it
is significant to point out its importance as an underlying fixation in Austers
works in terms of repetition. Involuntary repetition signals a recollection of
a long-repressed, perhaps infantile memory, and this triggers a feeling of
helplessness, lack of agency as the individual feels like a subject, inscribed
by a larger system of causality.3 Repetitions become, in essence, a mode of
ego crystallization in which the individual denies the uncertainty (the other-asunknown) in favor of the imaginary egos unity and clear demarcations.

These obsessive repetitions and rituals that help to define the self occur
throughout the novel, most directly by Maria Turner, the eccentric young
artist whose systematic life and aesthetic schemes border on the pathological.
When Peter meets her on the cusp of his fast-disintegrating marriage, he finds
solace in her elaborate set of bizarre, private rituals and enjoys releasing
the uncertainty of existence to someone elses private schemes: In my case,
I belonged to the category of sex. In the universe of Marias compulsions,
I was just one ritual among many, but I was fond of the role she had picked
for me, and I never found any reason to complain (66). Peter constructs his
relationship with Maria as not merely libidinous, although it certainly functions
that way as well, but also as a method of conceptually reschematizing himself
within another structure, a method of decreasing the feelings of chaos caused
by his divorce.

The sexual role-playing that Maria demands goes from playful to serious
to highly problematic within several pages. Peter sees Maria as taking role-play
not as diversions but as experiments, studies in the shifting nature of the self
(86). By switching role-playing to an ontological category, the novel apparently
hints at a postmodern paradigm of the a priori fragmentation of subjectivity
from the performance of identity to the performativity of subjectivity. What
emerges, however, is a modernist analysis of the polyvalent dimensions of

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selfhood and the various identities united under a unified subject. In such a
paradigm, the individual chooses which characteristics of the self he or she
will expose to the other, depending on context, thereby giving the illusion of a
multiplicity of distinct selves: identity as play.

Maria emerges not as a model of human behavior but as a person radically
determined through her relations with others. She wears revealing clothes to
affirm the reality of her body, to make heads turn, to prove to herself that she
still existed in the eyes of others (71), and she turns herself into an object,
a nameless figure of desire, and it was crucial to her that she understand
precisely what that object was (72). For Maria, roles are identity constructions
in relation to the other and compensate for a feeling of loss and the uncertainty
of subjectivity in relation to the self.

This problematic exploration of identity performance extends beyond
Maria as the novel obsessively meditates on the nature of roles for all of its
characters. The FBI men, Worthy and Harris, intimidate by being dressed for
their roles with such perfection (6) and could very well be switching roles
back and forth whenever they feel like it (7). Peter feels shame when he does
not live up to the responsibilities of fatherhood (59, 87). Several characters
misread romantic relationships as perfect by others when, according to Sachs,
We never know anything about anyone (107). The novel presents roles as
arbitrary and powerful unknowns, defined by an otherpeople, institutions, and
languageand governed by a damning, if unperceived, contingency.

As an artist, Marias projects reflect this concern with being-for-others
as a possible construction of an otherwise empty self. As arbitrary and
compartmental indulgences of her obsessions (69), her art seeks to totalize
existence within a framework tarnished with a desire for power and control
through reduction. Marias art projects, however, suggest that there is no
sufficient self in otherness. First, while working at a hotel, she attempts to
construct peoples lives out of the things in their rooms, an archeology of the
present (70). This fails. Second, after following a man to New Orleans on a
whim, she shadows his movements and creates a photodocumentary of his
life, constructing him out of a series of still fragments caught in time by the
others gaze (in the form of a camera). The essence that emerges from these
projects, however, does not reveal any identity at all, even for an other. Instead,
all she sees is a kind of nothingness, as though she had been taking pictures
of things that werent there. The camera was no longer an instrument that
recorded presences, it was a way of making the world disappear, a technique
for encountering the invisible (71). The novel does not imply that the real is
not there; rather, it implies that the focusing gaze of the other cannot alone
define subjectivity. In fact, it goes so far as to imply that the split between
the two ontological dimensions, being-for-itself and being-for-others, is an
inseparable gulf, radically alienating the individual by the others gaze.

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Marias third project underscores this alienation. Reversing her


photodocumentary of another person, she attempts to invert the lens, having a
detective follow her for a week, photographing and recording her movements:
she felt as if she had become a stranger, as if she had been turned into an
imaginary being (70). Maria learns nothing from this, however, and attempts
once again a portrait in absentia by reconstructing the owner of a phonebook
she finds by talking with the owners contacts. This project significantly never
comes to fruition, and the owner never emerges.

The novel depicts a futility in such a construction by presenting the limits
of Marias ontological views when they encounter reality. In one subplot, for
example, she experiments with identity substitution by exchanging roles with
her prostitute friend, Lillian, yet she finds that she cannot go through with
her decision. In one rather pathetic scene, she stands naked in a bathroom,
photographing a john, Jerome, in an attempt to make him disappear. Jerome
subsequently beats Maria, leading her to a spiritual defeat: She had stepped
over the boundaries of herself, and the brutality of that experience had altered
her sense of who she was (85). The novel suggests that Marias attempts to
defeat the contingency of existence by ritualistically compartmentalizing the
real leads to a transgression that dramatically displays the limits of such a
subject construction view. But this reigning spirit of chance (113) remains
locked in a repetition compulsion that undercuts Peters interpretation of her
altered sense of self.

Like Maria, Peter also strongly believes in the power of art to transcend
contingency, death, and the unknown: I dont mean to say that books are more
important than life, but the fact is that everyone dies, everyone disappears in
the end, and if Sachs had managed to finish his book, theres a chance it might
have outlived him (159). For Peter, storytelling can lead to transcendence, and
it is no accident that his story for us is that of storytelling. American literature
has a long tradition of eminent men being explained by a flunky: Moby Dick,
The Great Gatsby, and Absalom, Absalom! form an obvious novelistic trinity
for this structure. Peter Aarons name itself hearkens back to his Biblical
namesakes, also lackeys in the shadow of their great counterparts (See Osteen
90). On the one hand, his name suggests Peter, the apostle who denies Jesus
three times as Peter Aaron denies knowing Sachs to the FBI. Peter also both
legendarily founded the Catholic church and first preached to and converted
the gentiles (as we are given a testament in novel form). On the other hand,
Peter Aaron suggests Aaron, Mosess brother, spokesman, and first of the high
priests, whose role as spiritual leader was displaced by Moses at Mount Sinai.

The storytelling flunky role suits Peter, who needs to construct a linear
narrative out of the fragments of his friend. By reconstituting the lives of those
around himover and over againPeter can assuage the anxiety that he feels
before the unknown. This unknown proceeds from the idea that experience
in raw data is never thinkable. As Peter asserts while speculating on Sachss

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changes, I have no proof to offer in support of this statementexcept the


proof of hindsight (118). Only in retrospection can the individual construct
understanding without fissure, a principle that Freud called Nachtrglichkeit,
deferred action. We can never have unmediated knowledge of our individual
or historical past as all such knowledge deteriorates into the fragments of
evidence that constitute it.

Peters comments oscillate between the belief in the necessity of a
posteriori truth constructions and a savvy nodding to these constructions
arbitrary nature. He refers to his life as my own private story (98), yet he
continually tries to locate causal nodes within that shifting paradigm. Peters
obsession with locating beginnings and origins leads him to state again and
again that this or that momentfrom Sachss call, to Peters divorce, to Marias
phone bookis where everything begins (57).

On the other hand, Peter does not go so far as to claim that stories are our
only reality; and he distinguishes among truth, possible truth, stories, and lies.
Interpreting Fannys affair as a method of saving him from himself doesnt
mean its true, but as long as it could be true, it pleases me to think it is (99).
He realizes that partial observations are subject to any number of errors and
misreadings (33), implying a true or correct reading, and Lillian provides three
conflicting stories about her break-up with Dimaggio, which Maria claims is a
typical example of how Lillian confronted the truth (185). Peter realizes that
his story might be wrong, that the truth is quite different from what I imagine
it to be (25), yet when he learns that Sachs and Fanny have radically differing
views of reality, he claims to have come to realize that there was no universal
truth. Not for them, not for anyone else (109).

Most of Peters tensions come from this suspicion of incompleteness,
that he could be building his entire narrative on lies and fantasy; that his
cluster of random, observable facts will only tell a small piece of the story
(141); and, worse, that the story might be the only knowledge possible. As
Arthur Saltzman states, Leviathan is riddled with Aarons disclaimers and
misgivings, so much so that the story of Benjamin Sachs quickly evolves into
a book-long delineation of the inevitability of storification. For every insight,
there is an apology (163). Peter feels a pressure to construct his narrative
before the truth is out. Once the FBI agents tell their story, his may become
null and void, subject to the lies and ugly distortions that will circulate in
the newspapers: unless I finish it before they come up with their answer, the
words Im about to write will mean nothing (2). The hand that rocks the story
is the hand that rules the real.

Art, storytelling, and understanding, therefore, defend against the void
of unknowing. Consequently, to keep the defense against that void in place,
Peter must constantly repeat the act of retroaction, often inventing connections
between events that seem to have no literal or even metaphorical relation.
Sachs, too, partakes in this innocent mythologizing (26) by inventing causal

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connections between isolated facts, both of his own life and the world outside:
By gorging himself on those facts, he was able to read the world as though
it were a work of the imagination, turning documented events into literary
symbols, tropes that pointed to some dark, complex pattern embedded in the
real (27). In the same paragraph, Peter refers to Sachss language game as
both an obsession and a compulsion, hinting at Sachss blind necessity to
invent a reality without lacunae, a religion of totality and interconnectedness
that leaves no room for the uncertain. As we shall see, Sachss entire obsession
with conquering the unknown motivates his own cycle of repetition, differing
in cause and progress from Peters narrative trajectory.

Sachss need to pull events into a narrative whole seems congruent with
the novels intricate interconnection of symbols, tropes, and plot points. In fact,
several commentators have critiqued Auster for continually staging narrative
events more improbably than the most deterministic eighteenth-century novel.
Scenes unravel under an architectonic system so vast as to preclude any
possibility of free will or even mere probability: As chance would have it,
two of my closest friends lived in her building, and on several of my visits I
actually ran into her in the elevator or the downstairs lobby (47); Chance
had led her to [the book], but now that it was hers, she saw it as an instrument
of fate (74). As Eric Wirth notes, in Austers fiction, Chance is recognized
by its air of the inevitable (175). Peter offers an apology for this feeling of
inevitability within the context of his narrative: No matter how wild we think
our inventions might be, they can never match the unpredictability of what the
real world continually spews forth. This lesson seems inescapable to me now.
Anything can happen. And one way or another, it always does (180).

While Auster defends against the charge that he structures his novels
according to improbable narrative logic, chance as a concept takes on a
centrality of focus beyond most others in his work. In fact, as early as City of
Glass (1985), the first volume of The New York Trilogy, the main character goes
so far as to claim that nothing was real except chance (3). Several critics have
followed Austers obsessive meditations on chance as in some way describing
a world governed by a kind of pure indeterminacy, contingency, and freedom.
Tim Woods, for example, argues that in Auster, as we first assume, Chance
disrupts the logic of causality, and it opens up the possibility of anything,
or indeterminacy (146). The further we get into Austers works, however,
the more we see that chance does nothing more than close off options. The
title of one of Austers novels from 1990, The Music of Chance, underscores
this aspect, hinting at the very orchestrated nature of music, which does not
generate itself.

Yet as Pascal Bruckner points out, the novels never clearly express the
Wizard of Oz behind all these machinations (29). Why the novels avoid
being straightforward in their implications is never quite clear. To the end,
Austers novels seem deeply invested in a deity that dare not say His name,

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while constantly trying to explain this cosmic control as nothing more than
a mathematical hypothesis. As Auster defended himself to McCaffery and
Gregory: Chance? Destiny? Or simple mathematics, an example of probability
theory at work? It doesnt matter what you call it. Life is full of such events.
And yet there are critics who would fault a writer for using that episode in a
novel (Art 290). This is a nice try, but there are few people outside of a handful
of Greek philosophers who would equate destiny with probability theory.

What Auster seems to reject is the idea of chance as an authorial power,
which would reduce Aristotelian narrative probability. He does not reject
chance as a power of a nameless architect of fate, which creates actual
probability. Meaningful coincidence that simply happens relates more closely
to Jungs idea of synchronicity than to philosophical contingency. In fact, one
of Austers essays, Why Write? seems predicated upon the idea that writing
emerges from the desire to dramatize fortuitous happeningsevents that seem
unfortunate yet end up helpful in the long run. The essay consists of a series
of vignettes dramatizing people being contacted by long-lost friends they had
just thought about even though they had not thought about them for years. Why
write? Because kooky coincidences happen all the time.

Even in The New York Trilogy, chance and accidental events are clearly
determinate in some other system. During one of the key epistemological set
pieces, for example, Quinn tracks the elder Stillman at Grand Central but thinks
that he sees two men who could be his target. Panicking, Quinn starts to think
of his situation in terms that apparently reflect a worldview of indeterminacy:
Whatever choice he madeand he had to make a choicewould be arbitrary,
a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him to the end (68). For
critics like William G. Little, this perfectly confirms the kind of reading that
suggests that the identities of the two potential Stillmans are interchangeable:
Confronted with this radical cleft at the origin, Quinn has (nothing other than)
nothing to go on ....The detective, or the writer, is bound to miss the mark.
(158) As I have argued elsewhere, the point of this scene is that he does not
miss the mark. Quinn picks one of the Stillmans at random, and the novel later
validates that he was the correct target. (See Dimovitz 618-19.) By opening
himself up to contingency, an Austerian character inevitably loops back into a
system of correspondences that will take the character where he needed to go.
Yet who determined this need?

Austers work suggests a transcendent structure, a series of correspondences
that will undermine pure philosophical contingency and give meaning to an
otherwise meaningless existence. Yet the works refuse to name it as such.
Strangely, this refusal depends on the audience. In his book of radio essays
that he collected for NPR, I Thought My Father Was God (2001), Auster goes
so far as to lay out his requirements in terms that leave no uncertainty as to
his meaning: What interested me most, I said, were stories that defied our
expectations about the world, anecdotes that revealed the mysterious and

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hidden forces at work in our lives, in our family histories, in our minds and
bodies, in our souls. In other words, true stories that sounded like fiction (xvxvi). He goes on to convince us that more often than not, our lives resemble
the stuff of eighteenth-century novels (xviii), a comment that recalls his
defensive claim to McCaffery and Gregory that when he said coincidence, he
did not mean a desire to manipulate, for there was a good deal of that in
bad eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction (Art 288). Clearly in the time
between his interview with McCaffery and Gregory in 1989-90 and I Thought
My Father Was God in 2001, Auster no longer felt a need to apologize for the
metaphysics of chance, which is not the metaphysics of indeterminacy. At the
time of Leviathans publication, however, postmodern critical theory was in its
heyday, and Auster seemed to be aware that such a worldview might alienate
his core audience.

Austers obsession with chance and repetition crystallizes around
several key clusters of images and symbols. One of these clusters includes
the conceptual equation between three consistently repeated terms: chance,
accident, and falling. These terms are related in their derivations. Chance
developed from the Latin cadere, to fall, and it traces back to Epicurus,
who added to Democrituss notion that atoms fell straight toward the earth in
a uniform pattern the idea that there were microscopic variations that could
not be accounted for by anank, necessity. This sense of chance as falling
also informs another derivation of cadere, accidere, to happen, which
metaphorically served as the root of our term accident. As Gerard de Cortanze
points out, Auster clearly believes in the power of the accident (Le Monde
18-25), and I would suggest that his understanding of accident intertwines
with his other central conceptsrepetition, uncanny, chance, and fallingall of
which are integral to the novels worldview. In Austers work, falling always
connotes both a physical accident and the Fall of Man. Characters constantly
fall or have apparently random events happen to themevents that, were it not
for Austers repeated refusal, would seem to be predetermined by some fate.
In 2002s Book of Illusions, for example, Dolores Saint John accidentally
(138) shoots Brigid OFallon, which leads to Hectors fall and need for
redemption. In Leviathan, Auster tropes the central narrative act of Sachss fall
as the final understanding of a motivating power that exists both outside and
inside the self.

While chance operates as a metaphysical postulate throughout Austers
work, the narratives themselves problematize Austers stated intent. In
Leviathan, especially, characters only establish fortuitous circumstance
cycles a posteriori as part of the unifying retroactive narrative reconstruction.
The projection of meaning onto chance occurrences is another method of
mythologizing personal experience into a logical event sequence. This leads
to an uncanny feeling when thinking about the experience. As Auster himself

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claims, these occurrences can become quite disturbing at times, utterly


uncanny (Art 294).

As I have already discussed, Freud links the feeling of design implied
by such a world-view with obsessional neurosis (Uncanny 146). Auster
was clearly influenced by Freuds theory, and he spends a long section of his
meditation on his father and the nature of memory, The Invention of Solitude
(1982), discussing the repetition compulsion and the Freudian uncanny:
Freud argues that each stage of our development co-exists with all the
others.. He concludes: An uncanny experience occurs either when
repressed infantile complexes have been revived by some impression,
or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be
confirmed.Unhomeness, therefore, as a memory of another, much earlier
home of the mind.All the coincidences that seem to have been multiplying
around him, then, are somehow connected with a memory of his childhood,
as if by beginning to remember his childhood, the world were returning to a
prior state of being. (148-9)

For the Auster of The Invention of Solitude, therefore, each of these concepts
become linked: the uncanny, home, unhomeness, coincidence, childhood
memory. Coincidences are not only the chance occurrences composed by some
unknown and unnamed god, but they are also the unconscious reactivation of
a childhood structure of the mindan infantile reenactment in contemporary
consciousness. Once the recognition of an earlier memory repetition occurs,
the uncanny opens to an intuition of the void, the sublime, that which is beyond
willful causality. On the third page of the novel, Peter relates his feeling that
Sachs would blow himself up one day: It was no more than a wild intuition
at that point, one of those insane leaps into the void, and yet once the thought
entered my head, I couldnt get rid of it (3; emphasis added). Peters equation
of the uncanny with the same structural movement of Sachss fall will become
increasingly important as the narrative unfolds.

The themes that directly relate to uncanny experience constellate around
a series of negative metaphors and images: the void, the lack, nothingness,
intuition, mystery, death, Zen Buddhism, and female genitals. Each of these
figures plays out in Benjamin Sachss unfolding narrative. Sachss story is a
story of recurrence and the attempt to find an escape from psychic repetition
cycles. His wife, Fanny, foreshadows the meaning of Sachss death while
talking with Peter:
I remember thinking that you must have been a very serious person. One of
those young men who was either going to kill himself or change the world.

So far, I havent done either. I guess that means Ive given up my old
ambitions.

And a good thing, too. You dont want to get stuck in the past. (51-2)

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Fannys equation of revolutionary commitment and suicide with getting stuck


in the past establishes a correlational or causal equivalence between the two
and foreshadows the meaning of Sachss end, which follows this very pattern.

As Peter himself speculates, the moment in which Sachs is stuck in the
past seems related to a trip to the Statue of Liberty that Sachs and his mother
took in 1951. The event takes on the aspects of a repetitive leitmotif throughout
Sachss life; as Peter claims, it stands out in special reliefas though it were
the announcement of a theme, the initial statement of a musical phrase that
would go on haunting him until his last moments on earth (35). The story is
two-fold. First (the part his mother does not remember) Sachs and his mother
argued about his wearing the clothes of a regular American boy. Feeling
that he lived in an absolute dictatorship, Sachs struck a bargain with his
mother that if Doris Sapersteins boys were not dressed in their Sunday best,
his mother would let him choose his own wardrobe from that moment on.
His mother agreed, probably to humor him, but was surprised when the other
boys dressed the way Sachs had predicted: And just like that, I became the
master of my own wardrobe. It was the first major victory of my life. I felt as
if Id struck a blow for democracy, as if Id risen up in the name of oppressed
peoples all over the world (37). Sachs, therefore, equates his freedom and
self-mastery with his visit to the statue.

The second part of the story relates to his mothers vertigo, her feeling as
they neared the top of the Statue that she would find herself hurtling head-first
to the bottom (39). She works her way down the steps while sitting, one step at
a time. Sachs finishes this bit of family folklore with the strange conclusion
(and with no hint of ironic intent): It was my first lesson in political theory.I
learned that freedom can be dangerous. If you dont watch out, it can kill you
(39). Freedom, political theory, the Statue of Liberty, and his mothers fall all
link in Sachss mind to this ur-scene. This helps explain why Sachss early
politics never fell into any of the conventional categories. He was wary of
systems and ideologies (29). For Sachs, political theory depends on a freedom
earned outside of oppression, a space located beyond the psyches repetitive
dimensions.

The sense of freedom that Sachs earns at this ur-scene informs the rest of
his life. As he grows older, the disparate aspects of his identity unify, usually
in terms of property and a kind of master-slave dialectic of the self. He plays a
wild role to avoid bullying from others until he has undisputed dominion over
the territory (34). His unruly limbs, metonymically suggesting his feelings of
fragmentation, are willfully trained to obey him as though his identity did
not a priori contain his biological extremities. By the time Peter meets him,
Sachs is the epitome of a unified subject. He even has a beard that makes him
look like Thoreau, a metaphor for rugged individualism and free will.

Related to this notion of unifying ones identity is an interesting recurring
tropethat of the home as interiority. Once again, the uncanny is the English

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translation of the Freudian Unheimlich, un-homely as opposed to Heimlich,


the home. Peters impression of Sachs is that he always seemed to be at
home in his surroundings (19). When Sachs asks his deeply personal questions,
Peter sees it as storming through my most secret dungeons and hiding places,
opening one locked door after another (18). The novel continually tropes
Sachss belief in individual freedom as a possession of full access to every
recess of the psyche-as-home, a side effect of which is a more direct access to
language:
Words and things matched up for him, whereas for me they are constantly
breaking apart, flying off into a hundred different directions. It was a curious
talent, and because Sachs himself was hardly even aware of it, he seemed to
live in a state of perfect innocence. Almost like a child, I sometimes thought,
like a prodigious child playing with his toys. (55)

The novel links Sachss unproblematic and unarticulated belief in the


transparency of language both with identity unification and clear access to the
symbolic order and to a state of childlike innocence. A confrontation with the
Unheimlich, therefore, would threaten to topple his every belief and feeling of
unification, freedom, and access to language.

Freedom, however, is a problematic construct for Sachs. A sense of
psychological freedom, in fact, often functions in an inverse relation with
some other restriction. While describing his time in jail, Sachs claims that he
enjoyed the fact that your whole life is mapped out for you in advance. Youd
be surprised how much freedom that gives you (22). Later, in Vermont, he
finds the structured pattern of recurrence to be a great liberator. For Sachs,
therefore, freedom is not sheer non-dependence in choice. In fact, freedom can
be a function of slavish subservience to a determinate system.

At this early phase, Sachs belittles Peters suggestion that a link exists
between his visit to the Statue and the recurring trope of the Statue in his novel
The New Colossus, and he launches into a comic diatribe against the pitfalls
of psychoanalysis (40). As Peter himself points out, however, Just because
Sachs denied the connection doesnt mean that it didnt exist (40). Arthur
Saltzmans accusation that Sachs mythologizes his childhood (specifically,
a traumatic experience at the Statue of Liberty) to suit the requirements of
his eccentric politics (167) seems belied by the fact that Sachs himself
never suggests a connection. It is only Peters speculation and Saltzmans
own perceptive location of the connection that establishes a causal link. It is
perhaps also significant that Sachs gives up writing after finishing The New
Colossus. The novel as replacement object of his desire cannot satisfy his need
for repeating the primal moment, the moment of loss.

Sachss fall reworks and repeats that very incident. By placing himself in
a position to repeat his mothers near-fall, Sachss experience of the uncanny
opens the possibility that he is not as free as he had believed, that he is not

PAUL AUSTER /

459

quite the conscious master of his own psyche. He tells Peter a month after the
accident: It wasnt a question of being unfaithful to Fanny, it was a question
of self-knowledge. I found it appalling to discover that I was capable of
tricking myself like that (128). As Maria grasps him, he feels something that
resembled happinessa microscopic shudder, a surge of transitory bliss (130).
As Peter describes, it was not the fact of his desire, but the denial of that desire
as a duplicitous means of fulfilling it (129).

Sachs does not link this desire specifically to a desire for Maria, qua Maria,
but for Maria as a trope for the maternal function. She is still nameless at that
moment for Sachs, their entire repartee predicated upon Sachss forgetting her
name. She thereby exists for Sachs as a nameless object of desire, a projected
fantasy of the female as non-linguistic embodiment of the real. His desire springs
from fantasies of Marias pubic hair and buttocks as an Eden (a metaphor
for primordial innocence before the fall)a thought that he obsessively repeats,
a projector rolling in his head, and Sachs was powerless to turn it off
(127).

As Sachs falls, he feels that his center of gravity heaved upward (130),
and this decentering becomes in his mind a trope for decentering his locus
of control: If I could be caught by surprise like that, it must mean theres
something fundamentally wrong with me. It must mean that I dont believe
in my life anymore (136). Free will links in Sachss mind with life, and
the fact that he perceives himself as dead in the air annihilates his belief in
freedom. As he lies in the hospital, the power of words no longer a direct
mode of expression, he embraces his silence as a mode of repeating his fall:
To be silent was to enclose himself in contemplation, to relive the moments
of his fall again and again, as if he could suspend himself in midair for the
rest of timeforever just two inches off the ground, forever waiting for the
apocalypse of the last moment (134; emphasis added). Here is the moment of
Leviathans apocalypse, yet it is described in terms of a repetition compulsion.
By identifying himself with his own pathology, Sachs identifies his freedom
as a delusion, his subjectivity as merely an epiphenomenon of component
environmental inputs.

This epiphany of sorts leads Sachs into his next narrative phase in which
he tries to locate his identity in the other who seems to have determined his
fall. His meetings with Maria, during which she photographs him in the same
nullification process she found her art producing before, are an attempt, as
Maria describes, at an objectification of inner states. He understood that all my
pieces were stories, and even if they were true stories, they were also invented.
Or even if they were invented, they were also true (143). This objectification,
however, also provides a distance between subject and affect, between
experiencing the inner state and experiencing the inner states as something
other. Every portrait in absentia that Maria had produced earlier subverts
Peters assessment that Sachss soul was gradually given back to him (145).

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/ DIMOVITZ

If Sachs retrieves a soul, the novel suggests, it is an empty container of his


necessary repetitions and determinations from his past.

Leviathans three principle female charactersFanny, Maria, and Lillian
all take on aspects of the unknown, untotalizable void against which repetition
defends, and the novel frames each with a host of traditional psychoanalytic
tropes, some more obvious than others. Fanny (not Frances, from which the
name derives) is American slang for the buttocks and British slang for the
vulvathe two areas of female anatomy that Sachs associates with Eden.
Fanny takes on all of the traditional male stereotypes of the woman as a
mysterious maternal void of consciousness while at the same time suggesting
the traditional phallic mother archetypethe idealized mother who is perfect,
needing no one else. Peter explains that he began to desire Fanny because of
her walled-off quality that seemed to discourage strangers from approaching
her (48). The novel reinforces this image of the phallic mother by a subtle
rhetorical move of Peters: Fanny was poised, sedentary, catlike in the way
she inhabited her body. An ability to fascinate is probably closer to what Im
looking for, a certain air of self-sufficiency that made you want to watch her,
even when she just sat there and did nothing (48-9). Fannys self-sufficiency
yields a fascination, and the etymology of the word is suggestive. Fascinate
comes from the Latin fascinare, to bewitch, which derives from the noun
fascinum, both evil spell and penis. Fascinus, an early Roman godling
who was worshipped as sorcerys originator, was symbolized by the phallus,
and facinare signifies the odd fact that an image of the phallus was often worn
around the neck as a defense against bewitching (Fascinate 170-1). Yet
Fanny also is non-linguistic, and her lovemaking with Peter is wordless and
intense, a swoon to the depths of immobility (95). Fannys self-sufficiency is
undermined by her circular logic (148) and infertility, a point that seems to
drive Sachs away from her despite his conscious intentions.

As I have suggested, Sachss move to Maria is set in motion by a desire to
return to the Eden of her vagina, a return to the mother that sets up his repetition
of the fall. Sachs next moves to Lillian Stern Dimaggios house, functioning as
yet another attempt to return to the home, the Heimlich. By going to California
toward Lillian, Sachs steps into the chthonic realm of the earth that suddenly
swallowed him up (159). He visits Lillian ostensibly to give her Dimaggios
money, obliterate himself, and close the circle of damnation (188). As
Saltzman describes, Sachss efforts symbolize the attempt to surrender himself
to a system and thereby stem the tide of contingency (169). Sachs attempts
to identify with his home, this Heimlich, which would thereby paradoxically
reinscribe himself and his freedom within a closed system.

While attempting this reinscription, he also endeavors to straighten and
recompartmentalize Lillians house, collecting Lego pieces, miniature tea-set
utensils, the amputated limbs of plastic dolls (219). The toys stand as tropes
for a fractured innocence, hinting that the underlying cause is a desire for the

PAUL AUSTER /

461

reparation of his own fallen innocence. To a certain extent, Sachs succeeds.


By identifying with the home, he has yet another in a series of crystallizing
moments. Staring at Lillians matchbook cover that advertises phone sex, Sachs
finds that nothing was meaningless, that everything in the world was connected
to everything else (231). Yet Sachss attempt to use Lillian as a vehicle for his
salvation and reunion with a childhood imago is doomed to fail already by her
name: Lillian derives from Lilith, Hebrew for female demon (Isaiah 34.14).
Lilith was the demon, possibly derived from Babylonian mythology, who slays
children and women in pregnancy and childbirth. The novel hints at this dark
aspect of femininity (and male misogyny) by Lillians threatening to kill young
Maria for throwing a tantrum: You miserable, ungrateful brat! Ill kill you,
do you understand! Ill kill you right here in front of all these people! After
such a display, Sachs realizes that his salvation will not come from yet another
replacement mother. The slap and threat of death is the first sign of doom
(240) and Sachs must find another mode of recirculation back to his home.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, Sachs now identifies with his double,
Reed Dimaggio. Staring at the distorted image of the Statue of Liberty on the
cover of his own novel, Sachs believes that he finds the one escape from the
radical contingency that still threatens to govern his life:
All of a sudden, my life seemed to make sense to me. Not just the past few
months, but my whole life, all the way back to the beginning.I had found
the unifying principle, and this one idea would bring all the broken pieces of
myself together. For the first time in my life, I would be whole.I felt free
again, utterly liberated by my decision.I was no longer bewitched.I was
ready to march out into the wilderness and spread the word, ready to begin
all over again. (256)

This remarkable passage lays bare all the themes that I have discussed. Sachss
choice to define himself through the symbolic act of destroying replicas of
the statue that defines him will unify his subjectivity, closing the gaps of his
existence, allowing him to escape the bewitching aspect of the phallic mother,
and giving himself freedom by commitment to a toothless terrorism. And yet
his desire is doomed to failure. Sachss attempt was yet another blind leap
into the unknown (199), and he finds himself caught in the same repetition.
Establishing his identity in opposition to that which structures him is merely
the other half of identifying with the structure. By enclosing himself within a
cycle of repetition, Sachs will indeed begin all over again.

By becoming the Phantom of Liberty in opposition to Fanny as the
phantom of secret desire (51), Sachs becomes the portrait in absentia of
Marias photodocumentaries, a mere conglomerate of identities that are not
he, as the multitude of false identifications in his wallet signifies (2). It is no
surprise, therefore, that Sachs literally fragments himself by the bombs of his
own design, a subversion of Deleuze and Guattaris notion that the ideal model

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/ DIMOVITZ

for describing subjectivity is the desiring machine, the fragmented body without
organs. The bomb explodes in Wisconsin, the state where Sachs met Fanny in
1965 during a peace march at the University of Wisconsin. Sachs ends his life
at another originary moment, a place long since lost in his compulsion to repeat
the instant of his determination. Finally, the novel reinforces the repetition
compulsion motif by the fact that Sachs was born on the day that the atomic
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, yet he balances this by dying at the hands of
his own bomb.

In her thorough essay, Doubling, Intertextuality, and the Postmodern
Uncanny: Paul Austers New York Trilogy, Roberta Rubenstein has argued
that Austers use of Freuds The Uncanny added a postmodern twist to The
New York Trilogy, suggesting that the novel earns its postmodern credentials
because in the end irresolution replaces resolution (245). But if The New
York Trilogy can be read as exploring the notion of a postmodern uncanny,
then Leviathan represents a return of the modernist repressed. While Auster
uses the rhetoric and props of poststructuralist theory, what emerges in
Leviathan is a modernist exploration of the manifold dimensions of self. The
novel continually subverts the idea of subversion. Not that there is nothing but
stories; rather, all we have access to are stories that point toward a real that
more often than not eludes us. There is a reality to Leviathans phenomena;
the characters and the reader can simply never know with absolute certainty
what that reality is. The constant revisions of previous ideas about the known
serve to revise hypotheses, not destroy them. All of Peters reconstructions
are finally subverted by the efficiency of Harris, the older FBI detective, who,
based on scant evidence and a hunch, is able to reconstruct and confirm Sachss
identitya far more efficient reconstruction than all of Peters meanderings.

Thematically, Austers work constructs postmodern themes as an
unfortunate byproduct, not as a metaphysical primary. His work critiques
postmodern culture as one that denies a priori verities that are always already at
work and need no explanation. The central concept that drives Austers fiction
(and often nonfiction) is the notion of chance, an agentless agency that apparently
has the power to orchestrate the world according to an unknown score. When
he declares to McCaffery and Gregory that uncanny correspondences can be
reduced or equated to chance, destiny, simple mathematics, or probability
theory, he buries his more radically absolute worldview (destiny) within the
framework of more easily digestible hypotheses for the literati (probability
theory). The novels portray the controlling force of chance at operation in
everything. This leads to an interconnectedness between subjects, institutions,
and ideologies that denies the subject the possibility of free choice.

This view of the postmodern condition as a defect in our cultural
worldview is everywhere in Austers work. For example, Linda L. Fleck
asserts that Leviathan clearly links Sachss attributes with Austers portrait of

PAUL AUSTER /

463

his fragmented father in The Invention of Solitude (267). If Sachs somehow


serves as Austers analysis of the postmodern subject, he also carries the same
critique his father elicited. As Dennis Barone argues, if Sam Auster is the
epitome of the decentered postmodern man, Paul Auster does not present him
in The Invention of Solitude as the norm, but rather as a defective character
(13). Auster paints his father as a fundamentally flawed human, not the
fundamental condition of humanity. His father serves as the subject of Portrait
of an Invisible Man, a critical analysis of a man who always performed his
identity, always hiding his authentic self from his family. Linguistically, this
links him to Maria Turners portraits in absentia, and we realize that the father
is nowhere without a provisionally stable self, defined in relation to others. In
the words of the narrator of The Locked Room: My true place in the world, it
turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it
was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for
the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world
(275).

Austers work writes back against postmodern hypotheses through the
invocation and repudiation of several postmodern theorists. Leviathan, in a
much more deliberate and subtle way than The New York Trilogy, attempts to
bring together Austers critiques of postmodernism, his belief in chance as a
determinate system, and his understanding of psychoanalytic motivation as a
component part of this theoretical chance. The primary tension in the work
arises from the desire to explain the world as a deterministic system, and to
see what is left in identity after those influencing systems are bracketed. The
self is born in this play between facticity and transcendence. Austers work
stages postmodernity as an unfortunate byproduct of a culture that confuses an
ontology of no-selfness with an ontology that at times describes a multiplicity
of selves, unified under a subjectivity that is empty in itself, and at other times
describes a complicated, unified self that shows only aspects of that over-self
to others (thereby giving the illusion of a multiplicity of selves to the other who
perceives him). In a truly postmodern work, the layers of subjectivity would
reveal themselves to be like the layers of an onion: all system and no self. This
is the final move that Leviathan refuses.
REGIS UNIVERSITY

NOTES

1
See especially Russell, whose relatively early article is the most exhaustive and compelling
reading of The New York Trilogy from an earnest poststructuralist paradigm. Like many articles
of its type, it quickly moves from an exercise in a variety of readings that is amenable to the
deconstructive principles of Jacques Derrida (71) to one that claims Derridean priority over
the text: City of Glass illustrates Derridean dissemination (75).

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/ DIMOVITZ

However, some have argued that the Hebrew is the older story. See Emerton.
Lacan reads the repetition compulsion paradigm as reflecting an obsession with masking
the lack in the Otherin other words death, incompleteness of the symbolic order, castration, or
the contingency of existence (99).

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